SEO Step-By-Step Guide– 221. Can Affiliate Marketing Replace SEO

Many companies even today think that they can increase their sales levels just by creating an affiliate program. There is nothing wrong in creating an affiliate program to increase your sales levels but, it is certainly not the right approach to replace SEO with your affiliate program.
The first criticism against this approach is how are you going to get affiliates to signup for your affiliate program. Don’t you think that you will have to do something to gain visibility for your affiliate program? Affiliate programs without affiliates is no good. If you are contemplating of using paid methods like PPC, then you are planning for a way of spending more money on your website promotion. Your PPC ad spending will only continue to increase which will reduce your profit margins considerably. So you will need SEO anyway and your affiliate program cannot replace SEO. In fact, you need SEO to promote even your affiliate program.
Secondly, affiliate programs work on profit sharing. You will be sharing a certain percentage of your profits with your affiliate marketers. In order to ensure a decent profit, you will be forced to keep your prices high. This will make you lose the competitive edge in the market. You cannot expect to increase your sales while your prices are above the average market price. You must be prepared to live with low profit margins. You are actually looking for a higher priced marketing strategy when you replace SEO with affiliate programs.
Thirdly, your success and profit will depend on the performance of your affiliates. If you are lucky, you will attract aggressive affiliates but you cannot expect all the affiliates to be equally aggressive. If you happen to end up with poor performers, then your online performance and your profit levels too will be poor. There is no way of filtering or selecting only the best performing affiliates.
Creating and maintaining an affiliate program cannot happen without expenses. You need affiliate system that can manage your affiliate marketers. At times, you will end up spending more money on affiliate management than the profit that you get through them. Therefore, you must carefully review your options and use SEO as your main stream traffic generation approach. Affiliate programs can be used to supplement the results but not replace SEO completely.
When you combine both SEO and affiliate programs, then you will be able to maximize your profit levels dramatically. Start working towards a more reliable marketing strategy so that you can keep your costs under control and at the same time enjoy great online success. With careful planning and consistent efforts, you will be able to see success with your SEO efforts as well as your affiliate program.

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